Simon's image of two old men sitting on a park bench sharing memories and their fears of the changes surrounding them is indelible. "Old Friends" carries the message deeper.
In a two-minute field recording of the voices of old people collected from nursing homes by Garfunkel, disembodied voices reveal entire lifetimes in a few seconds. "Overs," a study about the end of a relationship, contains Halee's ingenious use of sound: lighting a cigarette and inhaling and exhaling its smoke underscore the story told by the melody and lyrics. Its sophisticated harmonic invention is toppled by its message "America" becomes an ellipsis, a cipher, an unanswerable question. Two people travel the landscape by bus searching for the track's subject, eventually discovering that everyone else on the freeway is too. "America" is a folk song with a lilting soprano saxophone in its refrain as a small pipe organ paints acoustic guitars, framed by the ghostly traces of classic American Songbook pop structures. It erupts into the musical dissonance that introduces "Save the Life of My Child." Its uneasy rock & roll frames highly metaphorical and ironic lyrics and a nursery rhyme bridge. Bookends opens with an acoustic guitar stating a theme, slowly and plaintively. They are equal collaborators with producer/engineer Roy Halee in a multivalently layered song cycle observing the confusion of those seeking an elusive American Dream, wistfully reflecting on innocence lost forever to the cold winds of change. Simon & Garfunkel quietly slipped Bookends, their fourth album, into the bins with a whisper in March 1968.
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